What is IT Resilience? – 6 Steps to Crisis-Proof Systems

IT resilience is the unsung hero that keeps your systems sailing through the turbulence when the storm hits. Your job is to make that hero rise to the occasion.

Read this article to discover:

• What is IT resilience?
• Potential crises it protects you from
• Differences from disaster recovery and business continuity
• 6 methods to develop IT resilience
• Benefits of a crisis-proof IT ecosystem

Food for thought – in numbers 

According to Uptime Institute, 60% of organizations had to deal with an outage in the last three years.

As outages become increasingly costly, a trend set to persist with rising reliance on digital services, the financial impact is growing, with over two-thirds of incidents exceeding $100,000.

Outages are just one of many causes of disruptions to critical systems in the enterprise. This underscores the growing need for enhanced investment in IT resilience to mitigate these expenses. But what does IT resilience really mean?

What is IT resilience?

IT resilience refers to an organization's ability to maintain functionality during disruptions to essential systems and to effectively mitigate and recover from outages. This includes maintaining adequate levels of service and accessibility despite software or hardware failures, unintentional errors resulting from configuration changes (often due to human error), and handling sudden spikes in demand that could potentially overload the system.

In what cases do you need to be IT resilient?

High levels of IT resilience are required not only during extraordinary events, but also in everyday situations. While the likelihood of an earthquake may be higher or lower depending on your geographic location, the risk of human error is the same everywhere. Even planned and well-prepared IT changes can have complications.

Two types of situations that test your IT resilience:

Real-life examples

CrowdStrike Falcon 2024 

In July 2024, probably the largest IT outage in recent history was caused by a flawed software update from security vendor CrowdStrike that affected 8.5 million Windows-based devices worldwide, crashing computers, canceling flights, and disrupting hospitals around the globe. It is predicted that this incident will cost Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. $5.4 billion.

Rogers 2022

In July 2022, Rogers, a leading Canadian telecommunications provider, experienced a 19-hour outage affecting 10 million people. The outage was so widespread that it prevented customers from calling 911, withdrawing cash from ATMs, or using transit cards. The outage was attributed to redundancy failures in infrastructure that allowed a system malfunction to affect the update process.

British Airways 2017

In May 2017, British Airways, owned by IAG, had a major computer system failure that left 75,000 passengers stranded over a holiday weekend, leading to a public relations crisis and promises of remediation from the airline. According to reports, the outage was caused by a maintenance contractor who accidentally turned off the power.

Business continuity, disaster recovery and IT resilience – Differences

Business continuity, disaster recovery, and IT resilience are related concepts, each vital for helping an organization endure and recover from disruptions. However, they emphasize different areas and have unique objectives:

• Business continuity serves as the umbrella concept that concentrates on maintaining the organization's operations during and after a crisis, addressing all aspects of the business.
• Disaster recovery is a component of business continuity, with a specific focus on recovering IT systems and data after an event.  
• IT resilience focuses on ensuring that IT systems continue to function during disruptions, minimizing or eliminating the negative impact on business operations.  

In essence, while business continuity and disaster recovery involve planning and recovery efforts, IT resilience is about making systems robust enough to withstand disruptions with little or no impact.

Why is IT resilience worth investing in? – Benefits 

According to McKinsey, almost two-thirds of companies reports that resilience plays a key role in their strategic planning – either as a top priority or to a significant degree. Risk and insurance managers are heavily engaged in resilience efforts, particularly in areas like operational and digital/technology resilience. It’s because these efforts offer several advantages:

• Minimized downtime and data loss. You significantly lower the chances of costly outages and data loss, ensuring continuous operations even during unexpected events.
• Better user efficiency and customer experience. A resilient IT framework allows your team to work without disruption, enhancing productivity and providing a smoother, more reliable experience.
• Strengthened security and lower breach costs. IT resilience plan strengthens your protection against cyber threats, minimizing the risk of breaches and the associated financial burdens.
• Adherence to standards and regulations. Your organization remains aligned with regulatory requirements and industry standards, helping you avoid penalties and build trust.

6 ways to achieve IT resilience

1. Be proactive, not reactive 

Since failures happen to everyone, you should preemptively identify and mitigate IT vulnerabilities through automated controls, chaos engineering, and problem simulations, ensuring fewer surprises when issues arise.

2. See the entire ecosystem, not just applications

Rather than merely upgrading critical assets like applications and infrastructure, evaluate the entire IT ecosystem and address its weakest points. Understand how applications, API calls, and third-party services interact.

3. Adopt an engineering mindset 

Leading companies invest in modern engineering practices like DevOps automation, CI/CD pipelines, and site-reliability engineering (SRE) to improve uptime and quickly resolve IT issues.

4. Utilize IT operations insights

Valuable IT operations data often goes underutilized due to fragmented tools and skills. By using AI and advanced analytics, you can significantly reduce incident identification time.

5. Design, develop and maintain for extremes, not normal conditions

Traditional capacity planning often falls short during massive digital traffic surges. You should build infrastructure that can quickly scale and handle bottlenecks across all components.

6. Change the work culture

Resilient companies create a culture that emphasizes quality and consistency, rather than relying on individuals to handle crises when they arise. Teamwork and the value added by hundreds of small tasks foster a culture of IT resilience (and overall business resilience).

Integrating IT resilience into the overall business strategy

The comprehensive approach to building IT resilience as part of a larger business strategy shifts the organization's focus from a narrow emphasis on risk management, controls, governance, and reporting to a broader, long-term strategic perspective. Rather than simply identifying gaps in current risk coverage, resilient organizations adopt this holistic view, turning resilience into a competitive advantage during periods of disruption as well as normal operations.

A key element of this approach to IT resilience is the use of crisis scenarios to test resilience during challenging times. By leveraging foresight capabilities, these scenarios are developed, and scenario-based modeling is employed to stress-test strategies and business models against future volatile environments – such as regulatory changes, and technological disruptions, natural disasters, and more. This approach allows you to go beyond simply assessing resilience capabilities, enabling you to engage in proactive strategic thinking and uncover new opportunities.

Accelerate your digital capabilities without putting business at risk

• IT resilience keeps systems running during crises and ensures quick recovery, making it vital for modern businesses.
• As outages grow more costly, investing in IT resilience is crucial to minimize financial losses and protect against various crises.
• Unlike disaster recovery and business continuity, which focus on preparation and response, IT resilience builds systems strong enough to withstand disruptions.
• Major outages like those at CrowdStrike, Rogers, and British Airways underscore the importance of IT resilience.
• IT resilience reduces downtime, boosts productivity, strengthens security, and ensures regulatory compliance, giving businesses a competitive edge.
• Achieve IT resilience by being proactive, prioritizing the entire IT ecosystem, adopting an engineering mindset, using IT data, designing for extremes, and fostering a resilient culture.
• Integrating IT resilience into your business strategy shifts focus from short-term risks to a long-term competitive advantage.

Find out how Comarch can help you build and execute IT resilience strategy with our broad portfolio of ICT and Data Center services.